Agnostics

"Why was it worth while for Mr. Jowett, the other day, to give us a new translation of Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War? and why is it worth your while, at least to dip in a serious spirit into its pages? Partly, because the gravity and concision of Thucydides are of specially wholesome example in these days of over-coloured and over-voluminous narrative; partly, because he knows how to invest the wreck and overthrow of those small states with the pathos and dignity of mighty imperial fall; but most of all, for the sake of the wise sentences that are sown with apt but not unsparing hand through the progress of the story. Well might Gray ask his friend whether Thucydides' description of the final destruction of the Athenian host at Syracuse was not the finest thing he ever read in his life; and assuredly the man who can read that stern tale without admiration, pity, and awe, may be certain that he has no taste for noble composition, and no feeling for the deepest tragedy of mortal things. But it is the sagacious sentences in the speeches of Athenians, Corinthians, Lacedaemonians, that do most of all to give to the historian his perpetuity of interest to every reader with the rudiments of a political instinct, and make Thucydides as modern as if he had written yesterday."

"The characteristics of his method of composing history consist, first, in the interweaving of political speeches, framed in a manner at once clear and elaborate, which introduce us into the secret motives and councils by which the political events of the period were governed, enable us to survey every particular incident exactly from that point of view in which it was regarded by each of the most opposite parties, and lay open the most hidden wiles of contending statesmen, with an acumen superior to what was ever exerted by the craftiest of them all; secondly, in an almost poetical, minute, energetic, and lively representation of battles, and those other external incidents which occupy but too great a space in the history of human affairs; and lastly, in the accumulation of all those highest excellencies of style, which can be embodied in the richest, most ornamented, and most energetic prose."

"The history of the Peloponnesian War finds an appropriately severe and penetrating recorder in the exiled Athenian Thucydides, unquestionably one of the greatest historians of all time. George Marshall said that no-one could understand the Second World War in our own time unless they had read him. Thucydides too wished to record great events; but he had no illusions about war: "In peace and prosperity both states and individuals are activated by higher motives because they do not fall under the dominion of imperious necessities. But war, which takes away the comfortable provision of daily life, is a violent teacher and assimilates men's characters to their conditions..." War, Thucydides believed like Homer, was a prerequisite of human society – "the ultimate constraint by which all settled societies protect themselves", as John Keegan puts it. He also believed that human nature will under necessity use ultimate force."

"It was, of course, Thucydides who, coming immediately after Herodotus and accepting this theme, contributed more than anybody else to making it [war] an essential ingredient of European thought."

"I do assure you that there is no prose composition in the world, not even the De Coronâ, which I place so high as the seventh book of Thucydides. It is the ne plus ultra of human art. I was delighted to find in Gray's letters the other day this query to Wharton: "The retreat from Syracuse—Is it or is it not the finest thing you ever read in your life?""

"Thucydides' history is a study in political and military leadership which after 2400 years still defies comparison."

"Thucydides concentrated on political life; it was here that he found the meaning of human effort. By understanding the political life of the present, and its military consequences, he believed that he had understood the nature of man in its perennial elements. He refrained almost completely from descriptions of foreign lands, unusual occurrences (with the exception of the plague), anecdotes about famous individuals, myths and cults, or information about monuments conspicuous for beauty or greatness. He was at pains to understand the Peloponnesian War as the sum of human nature – so much that he entertained no doubt whatsoever about the premises of his method."

"For close, cogent, and appropriate reasoning upon practical political questions, the speeches of Thucydides have never been surpassed; and, indeed, they may be considered as having reached the highest excellence of which the human mind is capable in this department."

"This day I finished Thucydides, after reading him with inexpressible interest and admiration. He is the greatest historian that ever lived."

"Thucydides saw that the foundation stone of all morality, the regard for the rights of others, had crumbled and fallen away. It had been the acknowledged foundation when Euripides wrote the Suppliants, not only of dealings between man and man, but also between state and state. The state embodied the idea of honorable men. But when Thucydides wrote, Athens had won an empire by dismissing that idea. In the big business of power politics it was not only necessary, it was right, for the state to seize every opportunity for self-advantage. Thucydides was the first probably to see, certainly to put into words, this new doctrine which was to become the avowed doctrine of the world. He makes Pericles explicitly deny that fair dealing and compassion are proper to the state as they are to the individual. A country pursuing her own way with no thought of imposing that way on others might, he points out, keep to such ideas, but not one bent upon dominion. "A city that rules an empire," he writes, "holds nothing which is to its own interest as contrary to right and reason.""

"One other Greek book of history all should know, perhaps the greatest of all histories, that of the Athenian Thucydides. Now Thucydides was in pre-eminent degree what Herodotus was not—a strictly scientific historian; one whose conception of the canons of historic precision has never been surpassed, against whom hardly a single error of fact, hardly a single mistaken judgment, has ever been brought home. Thucydides is much more than a great historian; or, rather, he was what every great historian ought to be—he was a profound philosopher. His history of the Peloponneslan War is like a portrait by Titian: the whole mind and character, the inner spirit and ideals, the very tricks and foibles, of the man or the age come before us in living reality. No more memorable, truthful, and profound portrait exists than that wherein Thucydides has painted the Athens of the age of Pericles."

"Recorded history is not an entirely unbroken saga of violence, but the historian knows that he must look much earlier than the twentieth century for the first examples of all the paraphernalia of violence with which the twentieth century has been familiar. International aggression, continuous, calculated, pathologically inspired? Thucydides is still the author of the best book on that subject."

"Power, Thucydides wrote, or its equivalent wealth, created the desire for more power, more wealth. The Athenians and the Spartans fought for one reason — because they were powerful, and therefore were compelled (the words are Thucydides' own) to seek more power. They fought not because they were different — democratic Athens and oligarchical Sparta — but because they were alike. The war had nothing to do with differences in ideas or with considerations of right and wrong. Is democracy right and the rule of the few over the many wrong? To Thucydides the question would have seemed an evasion of the issue. There was no right power. Power, whoever wielded it, was evil, the corrupter of men."

"Surely no more lucid, unillusioned intelligence has ever applied itself to the writing of history."

"The emotional power of the work is not to be denied, repressed, branded as modern sentimentality or condemned as a form of "brain-washing." The ancient critics recognized Thucydides' ability to recreate the pathos of events, that is, to lead his readers to participate vicariously in the sufferings of the war. That experience is at the center of any reading of Thucydides and is the product of the shaping of the text to involve and implicate the reader, both mentally and emotionally. The result is the intensity of engagement that so many readers experience as they struggle with the Histories. If we want to fully appreciate Thucydides' work, we must give the emotional power of the work its place and shape our reactions by its development."

"Thucydides' The Athenian General—a narrative which would give you the chills. It was written four hundred years before Christ and it talks about how human nature is always the enemy of anything superior. Thucydides writes about how words in his time have changed from their ordinary meaning, how actions and opinions can be altered in the blink of an eye. It's like nothing has changed from his time to mine."

"Another profound impression made on me at Oxford came when one morning I sat down in my huge basket chair and read the account of the Athenian expedition against Syracuse given by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War. It was the most dramatic thing I have ever read, the most overwhelming in its effect, and I have over and over again returned to it in my dramatic criticism."

"What we have done must convince us that Thucydides was right, that peace is better than war not only in being more agreeable but also in being very much more predictable. A plan and policy which offers a good promise of deterring war is therefore by orders of magnitude better in every way than one which depreciates the objective of deterrence in order to improve somewhat the chances of winning."

"Nor did Lord Chatham neglect to exercise an influence over the direction of William's graver studies. The Earl prudently, indeed, left to professional teachers the legitimate routine in the classic authors, but he made it his particular desire that Thucydides, the eternal manual of statesmen, should be the first Greek book which his son read after coming to college."

"The wide difference between the two characters, the slowness and want of energy of the Spartans as contrasted with the dash and enterprise of their opponents, proved of the greatest service, especially to a maritime empire like Athens. Indeed this was shown by the Syracusans, who were most like the Athenians in character, and also most successful in combating them."

"Of all histories I think Tacitus simply the best; Livy is very good; Thucydides above any of the writers of Greek matters."

"The antithesis between interest and principle, and the subordination of the latter when vital political interests are at stake, is a recurring theme in Thucydidean speeches, as is the view that the possession of power confers the right to exercise it over the weak, and that this is normal behaviour. That is the way the world is. The best possible combination...is power exercised with moderation and realism."

"In the whole politics of Greece, the anxiety, with regard to the balance [of power], is most apparent, and is expressly pointed out to us, even by the antient historians. Thucydides represents the league, which was form'd against Athens, and which produc'd the Peloponnesian war, as entirely owing to this principle."

"In a democracy ...someone who fails to get elected to office can always console himself with the thought that there was something not quite fair about it."

"The "Machiavellian" or, if we want to avoid anachronism, Sophists' theme that might is right is so prominent that it was clearly a preoccupation of Thucydides, and it is one to which no really effective reply — only a reminder of the fickleness of fortune — is made."

"Right or community of blood was not the bond of union between them, so much as interest or compulsion as the case may be."

"When men are once checked in what they consider their special excellence, their whole opinion of themselves suffers more than if they had not at first believed in their superiority, the unexpected shock to their pride causing them to give way more than their real strength warrants; and that is probably now the case with the Athenians."

"And the rarest dangers are those in which failure brings little loss and success the greatest advantage."

"By day certainly the combatants have a clearer notion, though even then by no means of all that takes place, no one knowing much of anything that does not does not go on in his own immediate neighborhood; but in a night engagement (and this was the only one that occurred between great armies during the war) how could anyone know anything for certain?"

"They have discovered that the length of time we have now been in commission has rotted our ships and wasted our crews, and that with the completeness of our crews and the soundness of the pristine efficiency of our navy has departed. For it is impossible for us to haul our ships ashore and dry them out because the enemy's vessels being as many or more than our own, we are constantly anticipating an attack."

"But what most oppressed them was that they had two wars at once, and has thus reached a pitch of frenzy which no one would have believed possible if he had heard of it before it had come to pass."

"[T]he Thracian people, like the bloodiest of the barbarians, being ever most murderous when it has nothing to fear."

"[T]heir swaying bodies reflected the agitation of their minds, and they suffered the worst agony of all, ever just within the reach of safety or just on the point of destruction."

"We must not disguise from ourselves that we go to found a city among strangers and enemies, and he who undertakes such an enterprise should be prepared to become master of the country the first day he lands, or failing in this find everything hostile to him."

"I think, therefore, that we ought to take great numbers of hoplites, both from Athens and from our allies, and not merely from our subjects, but also any we may be able to get for love or money in the Peloponnesus, and great numbers also of archers and slingers, to oppose the Sicilian horse."

"[T]hey possess most gold and silver, by which war, like everything else, flourishes."

"Contempt for an assailant is best shown by bravery in action."

"Men do not rest content with parrying the attacks of a superior, but often strike the first blow to prevent the attack being made."

"The dead lay unburied, and each man as he recognized a friend among them shuddered with grief and horror; while the living whom they were leaving behind, wounded or sick, were to the living far more shocking than the dead, and more to be pitied than those who had perished."

"The first page of Thucydides is, in my opinion, the commencement of real history. All preceding narrations are so intermixt with fable, that philosophers ought to abandon them, in a great measure, to the embellishment of poets and orators."

"As for democracy, the men of sense among us knew what it was, and I perhaps as well as any, as I have more cause to complain of it; but there is nothing new to be said of a patent absurdity-meanwhile we did not think it safe to alter it under the pressure of your hostility."

"The Spartans meanwhile, man to man, and with their war songs in the ranks, exhorted each brave comrade to remember what he had learned before; well aware that the long training of action was of more use for saving lives than any brief verbal exhortation, though ever so well delivered."

"We hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us by saying that you did not join the Lacedaemonians, although their colonists, or that you have done us no wrong, will aim at what is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both; since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."

"Hope, danger's comforter..."

"[W]hen night came on, the Macedonians and the barbarian crowd suddenly took fright in one of those mysterious panics to which great armies are liable..."

"We must march against the enemy, and teach him that he must go and get what he wants by attacking someone who will not resist him, but that men whose glory it is to be always ready to give battle for the liberty of their own country, and never unjustly to enslave that of others, will not let him go without a struggle."

"They stood where they stood by the power of the sword."

"[A]nd their judgment was based more upon blind wishing than upon any sound prediction; for it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not desire."

"Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can."

"Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defence. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries."